Pat Howard: Today there's no substitute for catching digital wave

We used to chuckle at my father when I was a kid for clinging to old routines rather than embracing a better way, by which I mean the U.S. mail.

Dad would go to the trouble to drive to a local drugstore to pay utility bills -- I don't remember how that worked -- rather than dropping a couple of checks in the mail. The gas probably cost more than the stamps, after all, even then.

I chuckle at myself now, because I've become that guy. I'm one of the dwindling band of fools who still buy first-class stamps to mail bills that could be dealt with online for nothing.

I'm not avoiding technology. I'm procrastinating.

My wife pays the bills but isn't very computer-savvy. And I haven't gotten around to getting around to creating all the online accounts and teaching Trish how to use them.

But I will one of these days, and that will make a very bad situation just that tiny bit worse for the U.S. Postal Service. Every time someone stops buying stamps and mailing letters, it gets harder for that labor-intensive leviathan to cover its nut.

A lot of industries, including mine, are working to surf the front edge of the digital wave and doing what they must to adapt. But that same wave is swamping others, including the Postal Service, in ways that make it hard to figure how they can survive in the long run.

My profession had only recently been wired when I first reported for work in the early 1980s. In the years since I've seen swiftly evolving technology deliver the incentive and means to execute cycles of reinvention that continue to accelerate.

At times it can be a bit exhausting. I'm sure many of you can relate from your gigs. But overall the advances in our tools and capabilities have been jaw-dropping and deeply cool.

I got to thinking about this stuff on Friday afternoon as I was giving a guest a tour of the newspaper and talking about its evolution during my time there. It came to me especially as we stood in a largely empty space in the center of the building that for those of us with long enough memories is emblematic of how technology can make entire lines of work disappear.

It was called the composing room during the first part of my career, and it was filled with printers standing over light tables, cutting sheets of headline and body type with razor knives, running it through waxers and then pasting it onto paper page grids. Then I took our guest to the newsroom to look over the shoulders of copy editors who now build those pages themselves on flat-screen monitors using very complex software that also feeds content to GoErie.com from the same interface.

Editors once spent a lot of time in the composing room overseeing how their creations came together -- never touching the type, mind you, lest the printers union shut things down -- and those of us who remember still tell stories of some of the characters who worked there. But at this remove it's amazing how clunky the process was then and how much better the finished product is now.

Of course those were the low-tech days when you had to go to a bank branch when you needed cash, and when you had to make sure on Friday you had enough in your wallet to last the weekend. Before ATMs, I'd routinely visit the Bank of Dad for no-interest loans when I ran short.

And remember when the scratchy screech of a dial-up modem was the soundtrack of the next big thing? People still use them here and there, but they would be intolerable to most of us who now expect to fly on the Internet.

Every now and then I get a pitch from Verizon offering peace of mind about my phone, or to be more specific, my landline. For a monthly fee, Verizon would repair at no charge anything that went wrong with the in-house circuitry that powers our ancient rotary service.

But Verizon ought to be more worried about the wiring than I am, because I wouldn't fix it if it failed. We keep that line mostly out of habit and a touch of nostalgia -- the number's the same one that's reached my family since I was little -- and more often than not people call me on my cell phone anyway.

Of course, Verizon or some other wireless carrier still gets a piece of me if I go that route. As the Postal Service is learning the hard way, the trick in today's dizzying world is to figure out how to make money on the next wave before the old one crashes.